Tag: Black Virgin Mountains

After the first sniper shot that took Duque down, the peculiar battle for the lonely, remote hamlet on the ridges of the Annamite Mountains took on an offensive intensity. He had swallowed the high-velocity AK-47 slug –made in China– taking it in the middle neck. Thus, Ulises garnered one glory as a Nam combatant, the first casualty of the assault on Bao Cat.

Papio Pina, nicknamed Pap Eye –because soldiers usually baptize each other with suitable battlefield monikers– snapped out of his stupor. He moved forward towards the gate, knelt on one leg and let out a long blast of suppressive fire with the M-60. He then hit the ground low again.

The troopers behind him a few meters down the sloping path, began to cautiously surround the hamlet through taller foliage. They also let go a rapid rifle fire sequence and a few pistol volleys. Ulises could hear the double zoot-zoot of Jairo Jaramillo’s grenade launcher followed by ensuing explosions behind the village pig pen. The attack maneuver, now led by feisty lieutenant Jeremy Popper began at last to garner some operational unity.

Under the protective fire, Papio anxiously crawled back next to Duque and wrapped a sweat towel around his neck to hold the bleeding. He then moved back near to the gate entrance and let out a few more bursts of machine gun fire.

Bullets zinged all around the hamlet, ricocheting off the volcanic boulders or were swallowed swiftly by the thin, straw walls of the huts. Clay pottery atop rustic benches at the central plaza split up into fragments as straw baskets tumbled all over the hard ground in shatters. A hog, half his snout blown away by shrapnel, ran around crazily, squealing in pain. Chicken, geese, ducks and an old rooster sought refuge in the shrubs.

Ulises did another eye search for the sniper. No sight of villagers anywhere. He got the sense that the dwellers, or their custodial guerrillas were now in deep trenches, in tunnels or sniping from atop the thicker trees above the ridge.

Immediately after the apparition vanished, Ulises felt a pang in his Adam’s Apple and his throat became incandescent. A drivel of blood burped out one side of his mouth.

In his death throe, the bridled poet in him sprang loose. Just his luck –Duque fancied– a young life oozing its vitality into the crystal brook that sprang out from the thick jungle, streaming in rivulets past gigantic boulders and cascaded to the river valley below. How he wished the waiting waterways beneath would carry his lifeblood eastward towards the China Sea, on to the oceanic currents.

Once in the Mekong Delta, Duque willed his sap would then retrace back north to taint crimson the River Sai-gon. The majestic Sai Gon Song. The waterway of his love days with Kikei Santos. Vietnam’s riverine artery, boggy and clouded already with the blood of Vietnamese ancestral poets and ancient patriots by the unfinished struggle to liberate their land from foreign colonialists and native exploiters. It would be befitting, Duque fantasized, that his energies then be one with the spirit of the Sai Gon waters, in a grand fluid finale of warriors and poets. A paradoxical homage for him as the willing musician of war, yet reluctant warrior.

As spirit and body wrestled to let each other go, Ulises composed in his mind what he imagined to be a sanguine song, in cadence now with his wildly beating heart. A melodic throb seeking escape out the veins with the rhythm of a dying soldier’s regret of going away without saying goodbye. He wanted to cry it all out load but only a muffled moan came out his broken voice box.

Amid the dead tree limbs dangling from escarpments of the Annamite Sierra and its fringes with the Laotian border, Duque knew that what ever melody came to him now was really a death chant. The ancient requiem soldiers hear when fatally shot in battle. A croon to the futility of dying without a gallant fight. A dirge of farewell about the estrangement of war and of pointless death. Ungraciously accompanied by a chorus of vultures about to feast on the fresh remains of a fallen, guileless soldier-poet. He stared in angst at the expiry birds as they sat there amid the choir stalls and misericords of the jungle cathedral.

Bao Cat… Truly not a quaint place to die, Duque thought. A place with no strategic value, a spot not even found in ancient Chinese maps.

“God! Rigor mortis will soon to set in by the foot of a dilapidated bamboo gate and a crumbling monkey bridge. To what purpose?” he cried to himself.

To get to Bao Cat and capture the guerrilla commander Quyet Thang, Duque remembered how all summer long -prodded on by captain Rodolfo “Ruddy” Cardenas– he perused old Viet Minh chronicles from the Nationalist rebellions predating the Indochina War. Once examined, the captain moved on to collect forgotten French war annals and then to field testimonials from shady Viet Cong informants or insurgent deserters. All to no avail.

In despair, they turned to less worldly sources as they shifted the quest to the portals of the Vietnamese spirit world. The phantom chase led to Bao Cat where Cardenas expected to find Quyet Thang alive or at the extreme, buried in a rustic tomb under the village cemetery. Hellbent on reprisal, Cardenas wanted the Viet Cong commander alive to chastise and humiliate him. Secondly, to gain fame as a top field intel officer.

Duque remembered how In those days, the captain, as if an appendage to his anatomy always carried a leather pouch filled with covert military intel charts that he figured had bearings for the location of the elusive guerrilla chieftain lurking in some remote hideout in the Annamite highlands.

In this evocations, moribund chemicals began to react in Duque’s brain. Memories became a slop of withered events and feelings swirled about in parallel threads. As his body bled in cinematic slow motion, Ulises felt he had a front row seat to the drama of death among so many last and lost impressions. The burial hymn in his soul soon gave way to a syncopated, jazzy burst of webbed recollections and most surprisingly, it all felt natural and precise.

The music within vibrated stronger as his body became weaker. All his life this was the only way Duque knew to metabolize sentiment. With musicality. In him, feelings always took the form of a melodic mood and a tone. Emotions came to him in low pitch notes captured from the effluvia of frequencies and vibes ejected by humans around him.

Now at Bao Cat he felt how the fibers of his soul were made of musical strands and not sparks of radiation as Jampa Quchen had pointed out. Each moment of his life was but a constant song sung to the ambiguity of life.

In his present agony, Ulises evoked the very few lazy summer afternoons at Firebase Marshmallow when he shut down the grotesque roar of war and composed tunes to homesickness, the love nostalgia, to youthful escapades and even the perplexity of military disruption. He remembered the jocular calypso he strung together with his guitar for the Papa, Whiskey, Tango company troupe. One line for each of the troop’s three ragtag platoons.

The tune lacked no festivity. It reeked with tropical verve and an unstoppable conga beat. Under captain Cardena’s behest and Duque’s musical mentorship, the Tango platoon came together as a Latin pop band for the morale uplifting of Latino grunts in Nam’s precariousFirst Corps tactical zone. For a short spell that summer of 1967, the ensemble did a string of tours along central Vietnam’s forward position firebases and played twice to US military headquarters troops in Saigon. The allied Vietnamese military commanders at Tan Sun Nhut were mystified. This music was too far from the inelastic, traditional court music of the emperor days or the sullen, high-pitched notes of the national folklore. Yet, Duque found they VVet commanders took a liking to the rhythm and the vigorous swing the band’s tropicalia style.

Ulises baptized the ensemble Viet Nam Son. Partly to respect the Vietnamese tradition of dividing names into syllables and also in homage to the pleasurable, the unholy sensuality of the Cuban montuno son.

The Papa, Whiskey, Tango sextet included two guitars, trumpet, an old German accordion brought in Da Nang’s black market, PX bought bongos made in Japan, a home-fashioned conga with water buffalo hide, a pair of cracked maracas and three voices. Some arrangements included a handheld marimba that staff sergeant Chuco Tabal fashioned out of Vietnamese noble woods he found in the rural villages.

Duque preferred playing au naturale, no speakers or electrical hook ups for both a clear sound and practical setup at the forward bases. The marimba gave the troupe a sugary, cinnamon sound straight out of Mexico’s Chiapaneca jungles. When coupled with bongos, sticks or clave, the band exuded out a fiery, flirtatious footwork that no sane, living thing could forsake at he dusty dance floors of the military compounds. As Viet Nam Son’s sound spilled all over the boondocks enclaves, even the grunt’s long-tailed macaque mascots twirled and twisted on their perches.

“Tropical animals know too well the taste of jungle sound,” proclaimed Cuban grunt and the troupe’s main vocalist, Mimas Bolanos. Born as Miamas Bolaños, he got rid of the Castillian “ñ”motu propio because when he migrated from Cuba via Spain to Miami as a child, his gringo teachers got tongue-twisted when calling out his name. In Nam, he dug up from his duffel bag an old girlfriend’s Spanish castanets and they were also thrown into the band’s instrumentation. Old World, Latino America and tropical music merged and went to the Vietnamese jungle.

Laying still and almost exsanguinate, Duque evoked the bizarre joy the band’s music stirred up amidst the rancor of battle. The band’s fare included top Latino dance songs of the late 50’s to early 60’s and lots of Antillean calypso and some of recent bossa nova sensuality. Viet Nam Son also cracked up mambo, boleros, three-step cha-cha-cha and the latest charanga styles from the streets of Upper Manhattan or the Bronx. Plus, Duque threw in some mariachi euphoria for the chicano comrades in arms. When Viet Nam played Cherry, pink and apple blossom in mambo time up at Marshmallow Hill, even chaplain Lombardi torqued his groin.

The almost Cuban national hymn, Guantanamera was a favorite of the crowds in their olive drab jungle fatigues as they sat under the dog days sun of the rustic, unshaded military bases along and below the Demilitarized Zone of central Vietnam. As impromptu dance partners, the nurse entourages and the Donut Dollies at the larger hospital bases gave the shows a perfumed, coiffured feminine touch. Atop the improvised bandstands, as he strung the acoustic guitar, Ulises remembered looking into the crowd faces trying not to seep in how many of the spectators would not be there for the next performance. Tango platoon musicians, included.

In a vapor memory, Duque evked how happily grunts at the firebases north, west and south of Da Nang and troops arriving at replacement depots in Saigon, fell for Cardena’s musical charade The warriors reveled, stomped their feet, clapped and danced on the sands of China Beach to the polyphony of the impromptu troupe. For the emotionally mangled grunts, Vietnam Son was but tuneful respite from the gruel and dread of the long-range patrols and the lethal ambushes.

The cherrysoldiers not yet in battle, upon arriving to a Viet-Nam Son show, probably imagined their war tour might be, in spite of it all, one big, sonorous wallop. An upbeat expedition under the pyrotechnics of luminescent flares, clouds of purple landing zone smoke, zinging tracer bullets with a soundtrack of battle drums and the sweet roll of a thumping rumba. For Duque, at least it seemed so in those initial days of the Papa, Whiskey, Tango platoons.

In late June, during a solstice day tour at the US Tan Son Nhut airport compound, Ulises recalled how a naval commander fromPentagon East who had recently deployed to Nam after a tense Missile Crisis tour at Cuba’s Guantanamo Base, ordered a name change. The officer insisted that a “G” be added at the end of the band’s name. He figured that “Song” was to be more acceptable and inclusive of the American GIs that were not of Hispanic extraction. Thus, much to Duque’s chagrin, the troupe became Viet Nam Song. Of course, title name mattered little when soon Duque found the band would be disbanded.

The sextet’s mission,though short-lived did become a joy for the Tango platoon. It provided the foot soldiers with some soulful satisfactions and a sense of reverie amidst the folly of the surreal days of war.

But, there were arms ta bear and strange tidings to bare as Duque stumbled upon a less musical truth. The Son band was but a ruse for a more deadly, shadowy military mission that was to bring peril, harm and moans of sorrow for all involved.